Revenue is not
company value.
A business can be profitable and still depend heavily on its owner. That dependency affects control, risk and transferability.
Free quick check · four questions · no email field
The reason is rarely in the numbers.
An owner-led business can be profitable and still hard to transfer. What decides it is how many decisions, client relationships and workflows run through you.
Time
Decisions that land on your desk although they belong a level below. A calendar filled by operational queries.
Risk
What breaks if you are out for four weeks?
Transferability
A buyer, a bank or a successor assesses not only what the business delivers, but how much of it keeps running without the current person.
What helped while building
Whoever built the business ran it, decided it and sold it themselves. What created speed back then becomes the structural bottleneck later.
Four steps, cleanly separated.
Quick check
A first read: where does your business still depend on you today?
BTL OS
A deeper stocktake, still from your own answers. You see which dependencies weigh heaviest.
Owner Dependency Diagnostic
Here the instrument changes: we capture the figures inside your business instead of asking you. A written report, a personal results discussion, and the baseline everything after it rests on.
Build to Leave™
We build the structures that make decisions, knowledge and responsibility step by step independent of you.
People arrive here from one of two directions.
You run a business, and something is in motion.
A buyer has been in touch. A review raised questions. The succession is due. Or you dropped out and saw what that meant.
To your situation →You advise businesses that carry this dependency.
Trustees, tax advisors, succession and transaction advisors.
For partners →What this path is not.
Owner Dependency Diagnostic and Build to Leave™ are not transaction advisory. In this mandate we do not broker buyers, run due diligence or negotiate a transaction.
This holds whether or not you ever intend to sell. A business that runs without its owner is the more steerable one either way.
Build to Leave™ was developed by Simon Haugk, out of twenty years of building, leading and advising owner-led businesses across different industries.
The background →